“Damn. I’m sorry about your wife, mate,” Gray told him.
I sighed in horror. “So awful. How did you manage with your child after your wife was gone?”
“I have a close family,” he replied. “We all helped raise Anxo—my son. He’s grown now.”
Jennifer leaned back on her seat, holding onto Sethi’s arm. “I have files and files of disconnected clues. Enough to create a media storm. But not enough to convict anyone or provide enough evidence to the police, and so I’m holding back. But I’ve learned terrible things. I’ll tell you a little about everything, from the beginning.” She paused, as if figuring out exactly where to start. “When I turned seventeen, I left the home that Rico and Petrina had given me, and I went to live on my own. In Athens. They wanted me to go on to university, but I had other plans. I took up odd jobs—enough to live on and pay rent. More often, I had night jobs—waitressing and things. By day, I slept and followed people. I followed them all over Europe.”
“So dangerous for a young girl,” I gasped.
“Yes, but no one else was looking for Noah by this time. The police had stopped many years ago. Rico and Petrina had spent a lot of money hiring private investigators, but it all came to nothing. I had to do what I could, for Noah.” She licked her bottom lip, stopping to take another drink. “I could tell Rico and Petrina were growing suspicious. I thought maybe they suspected I was going the same way my brother had—into the seedier side of life. They thought maybe becoming addicted to drugs. When I was twenty-two, I decided I had to move further away, where they wouldn’t see or hear of anything I was doing.”
“That’s how you ended up here?” asked Gray.
“Yes. Somehow. I can’t even tell you why I chose this island.”
“She knew she would meet me,” Sethi quipped.
“Maybe I did.” Jennifer flashed a smile at Sethi. “I felt safer here. I began painting for a living, and I’ve been doing that ever since.” Her eyes became a little distant. “I found out about other people who’d gone missing. And I found out about the Yeqon’s Saviours society. It was by luck I found out about them. One morning about five years ago, a London lawyer named Alastair Bastwright turned up at St James’s Park, London, with cuts to his head, rampaging and yelling out strange things. He’d been in a car accident near the park and had sustained a number of injuries. He was raving about the thirty steps to enlightenment and boasting that he’d killed more people than people had had hot dinners. He said he was going to kill more and that no one could stop him.”
I recoiled. “Oh God.”
Jennifer nodded. “Everyone just thought the head injury had caused him some sort of temporary madness. He was a respected lawyer, a married man with four children. He was placed in a London psychiatric ward. When I heard about it, it gave me an odd feeling that everyone was missing the real story. I went to London and convinced the hospital staff that I was a close relative of Alastair’s and needed to see him. I spent only fifteen minutes alone with Alastair in his room—that’s all the time they would allow me because they said the things he spoke of were too disturbing for a young woman to hear. But what I found out in that space of time . . .”
Sethi squeezed Jennifer’s shoulder while she took a breather.
Swallowing and growing pale, she continued. “Alastair spoke in horrific detail about tortures and murders. Not just by him but by a large group of people. I won’t tell you these things in detail, but it all made me sick to my core. I listened, and then I fed him names—names of people I knew had gone missing either in Greece or in a country close to Greece. I also gave him Noah’s name. He didn’t know Noah, but he knew three of the names. Two women and a man. Hailey, Andrew and Yanis. He described them, and his descriptions were correct. There was no doubt at all that he knew them. It isn’t as though these people had been in the news. They’d just been among the thousands of people who quietly go missing every year. He described their tortures and how they begged for mercy. He described—”
Jennifer’s body grew rigid, as if she were reliving the scene in the psychiatric ward. From behind her, Sethi gently stroked her arms. My instinct was to tell her she didn’t have to go on—it was obviously too painful and still raw. But I couldn’t do that. I needed her to tell her story. In the back of my mind, I was pushing thoughts of Kara away. I didn’t want to associate her with the victims Jennifer was talking about. I couldn’t bear it. I glanced at Gray, and I saw something approaching murderousness in his eyes. I knew he was thinking of his wife being at the hands of these people.